Eine Jugend by Patrick Modiano

This slim novel — titled Une jeunesse in the French original and Young Once in English — opens as a thirty-fifth birthday celebration for Odile is winding down. She and her husband Louis have run a children’s home in a village at the foot of the Alps for a dozen years, but now that their own children are growing up they have decided to close that down and start a new chapter in their lives. Louis drives a guest who has to catch a train back to Paris to the local station. Once his friend has departed, the rain and the station remind Louis of the time fifteen years previous, the tumultuous first few months with Odile when they were both on their own in Paris, not yet twenty. A youth, their youth, as the French and German titles have it; young once and recalled from early middle age.

The recollection that constitutes the vast majority of the book with Louis just finishing his army service in the Norman town of St. Lô. He has come to know a man named Brossier following a chance meeting one weekend in a café when they were the only two customers. On the rainy evening after Louis’ discharge, he encounters Brossier again, who says that the end of Louis’ time as a recruit is worth celebration and insists on buying him some drinks. When Louis eventually admits that he has no immediate prospects, and that he needs new shoes because the ones he has don’t keep out the rain and have left his feet and socks sopping wet, Brossier takes him under his wing and gets him properly outfitted. Louis feels like a new man.

From such small things are lives made. Brossier treats Louis to an entire celebratory evening, gives him some money and tells him that he may have a line on longer-term employment.

For her part, Odile wants to be a singer. Rock and roll is just reaching Paris youth, and Odile is attracted but not audacious or connected enough to get up on such a stage herself. Despite her reticence, a talent scout picks up on her interest and intensity. Bellune is over fifty and works for a record company. He’s out of touch with the spirit of the age, but he’s still giving it a go. Young Once later, and mostly indirectly, reveals that he came to Paris as a refugee, presumably Jewish, from Vienna. He had had success there as a composer, but never matched it in Paris. How he lived through the war years is not stated, but the intensity of his recollections and his distance from the present day mark him as a traumatized survivor. Nevertheless, he sees a spark in Odile and hopes that she can make records for his company.

To that end, he brings her to a voice coach. Songwriters that he knows from his Vienna days write several for her; everyone signs contracts. When Bellune is satisfied with Odile’s progress, he has a test record pressed, one that he can take to the men who will decide whether to go ahead with a full recording deal. Uniquely among the men Odile meets in the music business, Bellune does not want sexual favors to advance her career. Modiano does not shy away from showing this exploitative practice behind the scenes of music and recording, neither does he glamorize it. The Paris police also use Odile — without her knowledge or consent — as bait in a trap for a known sexual assaulter. At the last possible moment, they rescue her, but far from comforting her afterward, they hold on to her identity papers and make clear that returning them depends on her cooperating and giving a statement. Modiano does not spell out that the statement would not mention the police role in endangering her because that is self-evident.

Brossier does in fact have the connections to get Louis a steady job. He starts as a night watchman at a garage that belongs to one Roland Bejardy, a businessman whose business is kept deliberately vague but which involves a lot of expensive cars coming and going at odd hours. As Louis shows his reliability, Bejardy trusts him with more and more courier duties, delivering letters he doesn’t trust to the post or picking up small items. But the business always remains vague.

One night after a particularly hard setback, Odile is alone in a café, near exhaustion, and without enough money to pay for her coffee. Louis is the only other closing-time customer, and he offers to cover the difference. Bejardy’s pay is good. Seeing the state she is in, he escorts her back to her garret room. From such small things were their lives made.

As an early-1980s novel set in Paris by a major author, Young Once is miles better than Landscapes After the Battle. Modiano shows the seedy side of Paris without reveling in it, without taking the exploiters’ side. He manages to respect his characters all the way through the book, and somehow refrains from inserting himself into the story. Granted, Landscapes After the Battle is a low bar to clear, and Young Once is well crafted in its own right. Mondiano wraps up his plot but also leaves enough off of the page that a reader is encouraged to consider the parts of the characters’ lives that are not directly shown. He captures the energy as well as the aimlessness of young people embarking on adulthood more or less on their own. Parents and extended family are absent in both Odile’s and Louis’ lives, and Modiano also shows how such loosely tied people are vulnerable. Even roughly 20 years after the war, there would have been many such people. As the framing birthday party at the beginning shows, they had a quieter life after their turbulent start, but it’s funny to think they believe thirty-five is rather old. Youth.

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Une jeunesse was originally published in 1981. It was first translated into English in 2016 by Damion Searls as Young Once and published by NYRB Classics.